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Abstract
These days, the imagined destinations of ever more people, particularly in the ‘global South’, are not where they were born but elsewhere. Using a case study of educated (lower) middle-class youth in Dhaka, this paper attempts to demonstrate that for many ‘aspiring migrants’, the yearning for leaving is a metaphor for disappointment and disengagement rather than the first step towards transnational migration. Economic growth, rapid urbanisation and the increasing investment in education infest the emerging urban (lower) middle-class youth with new ‘modern’ lifestyle desires that cannot be fulfilled in their home country and generate a sense of disengagement with Bangladesh. The paper focuses in particular on how the – culturally embedded – imaginations of foreign places link up to personal (re-)evaluations of local lives. Nearly all informants explained how local socio-economic, political and existential insecurities made them yearn for ‘safe’ places where their dreams could be fulfilled.
Notes
1. I am highly indebted to S. Hajong and H. Kabir for their contributions and commitment to the research project. Kabir conducted most of the interviews for this paper. I, however, am responsible for its content. I would also like to thank Edien Bartels, Erella Grassiani, Dienke Hondius, Humayun Kabir, Peggy Levitt, Lorraine Nencel, Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff, Roos Willems and the anonymous peer referees for their valuable comments. The project was funded by the Centre for Comparative Social Studies (CCSS) of the VU University Amsterdam.
2. Thirty-six per cent of sub-Saharan Africans expressed a desire to move abroad. For Asian countries only 10% aspired to migrate, but which is still translating roughly to 250 million adults.
3. Most interviews were conducted in Bengali and translated into English. For the sake of anonymity or our informants, I have used pseudonyms.
4. In the Dutch university system, institutional ethics committees are not common practice. This, therefore, demands that the researcher is continuously reflexive of the ethical dimensions of the study. All interview subjects were aware of the intentions of the research and knew that the interviews were anonymised.
5. Since the early 1990s, most of my research in Bangladesh has focused on a non-Muslim, non-Bengali ethnic minority, the Garos of Bangladesh (see for example Bal Citation2007).
6. On the basis of research in a provincial town in northern Bangladesh, Abu Ahasan convincingly shows how college education is widely perceived as an important ingredient of modernisation, and social and cultural mobility. Being educated signifies the status of a civilised person and goes hand in hand with a need for an educated, ‘modern’ lifestyle and consumption pattern (Ahasan Citation2009).
9. A gruesome example of the consequences of inferior construction work was the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-storey building in Savar, a sub-district of Dhaka, on 24 April 2013. The collapse of the building, which also housed a bank, shops and a garments factory, caused the death of more than 1100 people, mostly female garment workers. Approximately 2500 were injured.
10. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Mujib) was the first Prime Minister of the independent state of Bangladesh (1971) and the political leader of the Awami League. Three months after his assassination in 1975, General Ziaur Rahman came into power and established the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Zia was assassinated in 1981. Mujib’s daughter Sheikh Hasina (Awami League’s current leader), Zia’s widow Khaleda Zia (leading the BNP) and their party members have continued fighting each other fiercely, also over issues such as the names of the national airport, the construction of memorials, etc.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ellen Bal
ELLEN BAL is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije University Amsterdam.
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